* * *
In the days that followed, my condition still atrocious if no worse, I weighed Her ‘advice’, which seemed to me wholly malicious, a further joke at my expense. The notion She appeared to float of my climbing into the skin of some rough sleeper was loathsome. I saw, however, Her base logic.
If I was to plan a murder, then privacy, anonymity seemed essential. I would need to lure someone to a secure, unseen place, do them to death, find a way to destroy the old carcass … Some wretch with no address, uncared for, liable to do anything for money – yes, one could see the ease. But, my aesthetic sense aside, could I afford to inhabit a body in which I would be penniless, sickly, vulnerable, liable at any time to run out of road? No, I knew I had to take a bigger risk, seek out a personage inside whom I could sit easily – a man I could impersonate.
It struck me then that some of the richest citizens among us could meet Her criteria just as readily as the very poorest – essentially private people, detached, aloof, without dependents. Mentally I ransacked the small but not insignificant sample of men on whom I’d operated, whose intimate records I held. One jostled to forefront in my head: Tim Judson, mid-30s, bachelor, independently wealthy, bequeathed a huge property portfolio that he had only made larger. A little older than I would wish, ideally, and a little too much sought after by Tatler, albeit for his perpetual squiring of young girls reared on the royal estates. But in our discussions prior to my sharpening his cheekbones he’d casually boasted to me of his huge estate outside Stevenage, the quiet luxury annexe apart from the main house where he worked. Now, quite suddenly, I saw myself digging Timothy’s grave within his own grounds.
His details were in my database, at the clinic but copied at home. I considered the ways of badging myself back into Artemis Park, the neighbours and the porter each holding spare keys. Otherwise I would have to make a raid. But as I shifted into attack mode I impressed myself with the speed of my resolution, felt something predestined in it.
At first it seemed I was mistaken: the following day I drove the Spider to Artemis, rehearsing various yarns – I was Forrest’s nephew? His mechanic, plumber, gardener? – and I had parked, entered, got as far as my old front door – when I heard voices within, one of them unmistakably Grey’s, suddenly my nemesis now – and I turned heel, my heart beating hard.
Relations with Malena, I could see, were near-unsalvageable, yet I knew she was bound to this man, albeit by ties from which he was most radically freed. Now I was fighting an insolent wish, an urge to be caught, to tell Malena precisely whom she was dealing with, to ask her how she liked her blue-eyed boy. Instead I kept myself to myself, drank heavier still, even on one occasion – according to evidence I’ve seen – called Steven. But the dark was coming down. I was feeling sicker and shakier by the minute, clammy-handed, double-vision, drastically unsteady on my feet. I was clutching my stomach as if to hold it together when Malena crept through my door with a tale of some footling dinner arrangement for her idiot Buddhist friend.
I followed her to the bedroom, thinking only that I would crawl under the covers awhile. She dressed in silence, asked me to put on a necklace for her. And then I saw my seeming redemption – in a drawer of her jewellery box, the keys to Artemis Park, unmistakable by the key-fob we chose as our small memento of Vienna’s Leopold Museum. I knew how to stage the row, fake my stomping out in high dudgeon. Once she was gone I raced back down, snatched my prize.
I will say I do regret the manner with which I handled my final departure from the house. I had to use force, force Malena from my path. It was, in retrospect, a bitter farewell, and if I’d had time to brood on it the sadness might have sunk me. All I can say is that as I left I heard her breathing. But I fully expected that on waking she would summon the police. My sands were running. I made for my old lair at high speed, sensing low-frequency tremors of Her voice in my head – as if warding me away. But I didn’t see how or why She would stop me as I fulfilled what was Her bidding. Certainly there seemed enough evil in my plan to please Her.
Then at last, my illusory homecoming, a synthetic sensation of relief, restored to that uterine darkness where I’d lain low for so long. Probably I dallied longer than was sensible – but my old familiar habitat was consoling me a little. I went to my study, noting my therapy mask and #15 scalpel laid out on the dining table as if for some Apache rite. So I snatched them up, and in my study I took the J–L box file from the shelf, grabbed a box of latex gloves, started to cram all into the soft black leather satchel that was my usual carry-on – had begun, even, to feel some upsurge of spirit – when I heard the front door, and my hopes crumpled up inside me. Delicately as I dared, I detached pages from the file, pushed these into the bag, crept with breath bated into the dining room and behind the door, where I fixed the mask onto my face and took the scalpel in hand – a puny sword and armour. By now a torch-beam was darting round the walls. I waited, waited, only looking, only listening, not a thought in my head but escape.
I achieved it, finally, by violence, this having become my crutch. I can only say that my assailant was larger and fiercer than me, and, again, when I struck him I required that he stay down. With this accomplished I was on my way, cutting and running, gone, gone, gone.
* * *
A fugitive now – doubly so, triply – I abandoned the Spider near the station and made it by a hair’s breadth onto a northbound train. When I recovered my breath, returned in my head to the business of what I planned to do to Timothy Judson – my spirits were instantly and heavily sunk by the grisly lunacy of it. I was miserable as I stared out of the window, discerning through the dark the fleeting grass-banks and backs of houses, my alien face superimposed in the glass, crossed by shadow. Now and then I glanced down the aisle to the other occupant of my carriage. He was sleeping soundly if hoarsely, a pitiful sight, a scarecrow of a man: 30-ish maybe, in a rancid black hooded waterproof and jeans, the left side of his face and scalp scarred by third-degree burns. His left hand, lolling on his lap, was also lividly burnt, and part-mutilated.
As I gazed, despite myself, he stirred, looked about him in terror, leapt up to the window. My eyes went to my boots, but I sensed his coming directly for me. His speech was impeded.
‘Eh, fella, fella. Will you wake me in three stops? If I drop off, yeah? Three stops, will ya?’
I nodded. He leaned in, close enough that I could nose him, and grasped my knee. ‘Good boy, ya.’ Then he released me, staggered back to his seat, and within a minute he was snoring again.
His pain was not my concern. I had to get myself in hand, force myself back round to the scalpel in my pocket, the mission I’d set myself. Behind me was ruin, a hiding place razed. Ahead, so I believed, lay Tim Judson. But what would I do, how long would I, could I afford to lie in wait, if and when I found him? What if late summer saw him in the Hamptons, Barbados, St-Tropez …? Could I lie low in long grass, on damp leaves? For how many days, hours?
The train shuddered on past depots and sidings, cooling towers and gas burners. Then the view opened: fenced fields, farmhouses, enclaves glimpsed at the end of unapproved roads. Woodland had a new appeal to me: somewhere to lose oneself, cool dark depths from which one might not emerge. A reverie of sorts crept over me in spite of my plight. To think that I could daydream, still – imagine I was headed somewhere, awaited by some friend and ally.
We plunged into the darkness under a bridge. I felt a tingling sensation in my palms, realised how clammy were my hands. The sensation turned to ants all across my skin – then agony through my innards, like a poison injected in the shape of a questing parasite, through my gut and up into my thorax. My gorge rose up, I needed to breathe but couldn’t, I was gulping hard, head roiling.
Not halfway through my journey, all of a sudden I was sickeningly sure I had run out of road. I writhed back in my seat, the darkness hurtling by on both sides of the near-empty carriage, and it seemed to me now I was being fired like a rocket straight into onrushing oblivion. I lur
ched from my seat, wanting a hole to be sick in.
And there I saw Her – through the glass of the inter-carriage doors. She stood squarely to me, perfectly poised, Her face a terrible pitying smirk. I grasped and rattled the door handle, was unable to budge it. With a slow shaking of Her head She lifted an index finger and wagged it slowly to and fro before Her face – the universal symbol of refusal – also the ticking of a clock. And in my head I saw Her turned hourglass, its running sands, understood that in the insolence of my self-pity I had dallied too long, so forfeiting my choice.
Then She was gone and I had no feeling but nausea, no thought but that nausea, save for the wishful fast-fading image of being safe and well in some parallel world. As I groped uselessly at the door my heart thundered, my throat pulled tight as a garrotte, and I fell. My eyes were up in my head, the strip-lights of the carriage like tracer bullets firing over me. Then the Burnt Man’s face swam into my field of vision. But I was going, going … The face stooped nearer – that scorched landscape, bewilderment in its eyes, its breath toxic – yet driven by a pulse, holding a charge, no question. Life!
Going, going … and with all I had left my fingers found my scalpel, pulled it free, and I swung.
Then, once again, the headlong deathless plunge into black.
* * *
And there I stood, over the outstretched figure of the late MacCabe – alone with the dead man, my wake for Killian. His stricken beauty, the instantaneous ethereal cruelty of his demise, nearly stole my own breath – my hard, sour breath. Already I was aware of great muscular activity, ‘shakes’, about my new person: a very obvious debility of constitution. My clothes were uncomfortably adhered to me. I raised a hand – my ‘good’ hand – before my eyes in the hard light. It was grubby, knuckly, coarse. But mine. And gingerly I dared to touch the crust of my ruined face, knowing now my name – Darren – Darren Carver.
Away, away! was the thought in Darren’s head. And so I resumed this ‘new life’ to which I’d been condemned.
Everything about my new misshape, my hideous predicament, was wrong, wrong, wrong. Back in the heat of the bargain with Her I believed I’d envisaged every conceivable danger and deathtrap. Never had I imagined this – that I would be caged up for sport, locked inside a hideous wreck of a human form.
And yet, still, my wits were keen, my mind kept its cunning, whatever the volume of grey matter in the new head I’d invaded. I grabbed up my leather bag, crouched down by MacCabe and, carefully as I could, prised my scalpel from his fingers, tugged his wallet from his jeans, conducting now the fastidious corpserobbing Vukovara had previously forbade me. I glanced up in time to see a conductor galumphing down the aisle of the next carriage, and I ducked. But luck, magic luck, seemed to favour me: the train was easing down into a station. For all that, I was beside myself. As the brakes shuddered through the carriage I lurched to the exit, hammered at the console until the doors hissed apart. The platform was deserted but I felt eyes on me, broke into a run, even as the train rushed away at my back. The guilty flee, though none pursue.
To my right, beyond the station, was nothing but rows of grim sodium-lit semis. But beyond the opposing platform to my left I could see woodland, fields, the glint of a river. I felt innately familiar with this terrain … And I greatly desired the cover of darkness. I jumped from the platform, dropped to the stony trackside, picked across the lines. The stones were treacherous underfoot, jarring my ankles as I pounded along, under a masonry bridge, then clambered up a grassy rise and hauled myself over a spiked fence – landing badly. Still I ran on, ran for cover, to cover my face – into and over the fields, fast as my hampered legs could carry me, feeling a painful war within my ribcage. Then I stumbled, fell headlong, into some sludgy mire.
For some time I lay there, winded, on the sodden grass, as if the earth might rise on all sides and swallow me. Could I persuade it to strip me of every human trace, all identifying marks? My fingers scooped grass and mud. A return to clay no longer seemed so frightful. I felt the wetness seep into my clothes, a slowly loathsome sensation – like cold blood, a spreading stain as though a hole were blown through me, some gaping exit wound. And yet I didn’t stir: that sensation of being mired, of sinking thus, offered a queer consolation.
As it could not last, so, finally, I got to my feet – myself as ever, and so radically not, alive still, but in what sense? I set to walking, unsteadily, hacked my way over a wire fence into the open plain of a grazing field. Beyond the next perimeter I could see the bleary lights of a squat pub, lights that drew me on through the dark.
I crept round the tables of the pub’s silent garden, my driving thought to find sanctuary behind a locked door. Deeper than that, though, I had a hard need to face myself, acquaint myself fully with how I now looked to the world.
I ducked in the pub’s back door, my hood up and chin to chest, clocked the familiar pictogram and pushed through into the men’s toilet, wincingly sure that I’d been seen by a pair of wary eyes from the bar-room. But then I was stood before a soap-smeared mirror and the pitiless glare of a bare bulb, conscious of rank odour rising not from the stalls but, rather, the loose neck of my tee-shirt. Unfathomable to me, in that moment, that I’d ever found the smell of MacCabe so disagreeable.
At some point in his young life this ‘Darren Carver’ had suffered third-degree facial burns, the skin on the left side charred to hard eschars, much lost epidermis, nerve endings destroyed, hair follicles and sweat glands gone. Worse, some muscle underneath had burnt also – irreversible damage, lost sensation, probably a couple of forlorn grafts to limited effect. As for the rest of his – my – face, it had the haunting gauntness that comes when a body is reduced to feeding on itself for want of other sustenance. For what it was worth, the surgeon had made a decent job of the stumps of the two lost fingers, both gone at the proximal joint yet unscarred and tactile.
As I surveyed this devastation and my inheritance of it, some mental vestiges of the host were returning to me, in now-familiar fashion, yet far more ferocious, toothed and jagged than those that had struck me while I was housed inside MacCabe. The fierce force of the blast that torched Carver’s face and blew off those fingers – I felt that anew – could even feel the miserly mercy that it had missed my eyes. I understood I’d lit that lethal little stove not to cook – since I had no provisions – but to keep warm in the arctic squat I then called home.
Shaken, I groped my way back and down onto the seat of a toilet head. Needing to piss, I found my crotch and rectum predictably disgraceful. Fumbling both hands into the anorak’s pockets I located a square of card – my train ticket – and that touch brought another shard of self-knowledge. Tonight I had been travelling homeward – not in hope, indeed to a place I’d long ceased to consider home. Yet I was trying my luck, the last dregs of it. Carver’s life-story had bled back into my head, versions of which, I knew, he had sworn out before many insensible audiences, over cans of drink frothy with spit, ratty little joints with barely any draw and hardly more tobacco. Slowly but steadily I was assailed by awful memories of a doormat mum and a bullying stepdad – a slob, a yob, a mean fucking cunt. Feelings of fear and rage, of rock-bottom self-esteem, rolled in like the tide.
I’d left rather than be kicked out – found building-site work, roofing and general humping. One day one of my oppos fell and broke his back – no safety net, I hadn’t taken the time to fix it. An unconscionable error. I was finished in that game. I drowned my sorrows, far too long. The girl I bunked with told me to go. I lurched from sofa to living-room floor until I’d used up my favours, worn out my few mates. Still I had no way home. For a while, since it was summer, I slept in parks, washed in library toilets, mine-swept drinks off pub trestles. Then autumn gusted in. The hostels were essential, but it seemed me and the hostels didn’t get on – me and the clientele tended to have ‘issues’, though no one could tell me I was as shit-house mad as some of them loons. Nonetheless: barred here and barred there, stigmatised for
‘aggressive behaviour’, I had felt a growing need to exhibit my stigmata. I hardened up, coarsened for sure; found brief respite in drugs that gave me visions. The mob who turned me onto all that also got me into their squat. But the drugs messed me up, screwed my head on wrong, as it was that night I set myself ablaze. I could see myself in theatre as they worked on me …
And in that moment, from within Carver’s skin, I saw this poor devil as his mother must have seen him years before – the bairn, the boy who surely made his parents fond at least once. And my narrow chest was jammed up with bland, gummy sentiment, my eyes began to stream at the miserable, pitiful shame of it. I could hear that I was muttering to myself – Carver’s habit, never mine – but it just couldn’t be helped.
Then the door before me was hammered and rattled, a voice cursing me blindly. I opened the door a crack and it was shoved wide by a burly shaven-headed man in a sweatshirt as red as his face.
‘Oi. Toilets for customers only, right? So sling it, you.’
Evicted, from such a palace … Shambling past him I felt my shame burn fiercer, transforming by heat into an anger, worsened yet when I saw the smug, scurvy faces eyeing me from the scant bar-room. I chose, then, to be a customer. I had MacCabe’s wallet, after all. I ordered a large whisky – Grouse, their meagre best – tossed a ten-pound note on the bar. The landlord only glared, until one of those regulars cackled that ‘Bob’ could hardly afford to turn away custom. In silence my glass was filled. Head high, I carried my prize back out into the darkened garden, sat at a trestle, whispered into the rim of the glass until I sensed I had company – a trio of stocky gents, regulars who, clearly, hadn’t supported my case back there.
The Possessions of Doctor Forrest Page 29